the break

Do you remember the dark ages before the world wide web?   I do.  I remember distinctly the first few times that I tried e-mail.  I used Netscape Navigator and wrote like I was composing a formal letter.  I did not yet grasp the concept of the immediate, cheap connection to anyone at any place.  Now I have a better understanding of how easy it is to reach out and touch someone.  There aren't any doors to formally knock on and introduce yourself- people can just appear into your cyberworld without warning.  I see a lot to gain from inter-connectivity.  Thanks to the web I was able to contact the actual sources of information when I was writing my thesis.  Thanks to the web I made some friends before I moved to Italy.  Thanks to the web our family was able to finally diagnose my father's autoimmune condition. 

I spent a long time living in a happy bubble of anonymous familiarity until I eventually was treated to the other side of internet life.  As easily as I can reach out to someone, it is just as easy for someone to reach out to me.

That familiarity that we have with our internet community can sometimes expose us in ways that we didn't think about.  I used to have a blog previous to this one.  I used my real name.  Why not when the only people who read it were my friends?  Eventually I started receiving comments from people who I didn't know and was pleasantly surprised that strangers related to me and possibly even enjoyed my stories.  I was getting such positive feedback that I continued to share.  Then one day it happened- a snarky comment.  Not just a snarky comment, but a comment that cut deeply because it was a very personal attack.  It was an attack of me that was armed by my own words. It attacked something fairly intimate about my life which I had initially shared with others with a belief that my respect for my readers would be reflected back.  After walking around with a lump in my throat for a few days I shut down the blog.  I had very quickly learned that everything I put out into the world does come back with magnitude and the return shot is not always pleasant.

In the past two months I have had two of the blogs on my blogroll go inactive after the bloggers decided that they weren't so keen on receiving abuse.  One the the bloggers is a dear friend and so I can still participate in her life and the other is a woman who I have never met and probably never will.  I hope that they both come back because I have enjoyed participating in their virtual lives.    I also have thought about the pros and cons of putting yourself out there and in my case I came back because I discovered that I enjoyed the interaction with others.  Since most of my readers do not know me in my "real" life I find a kind of honesty in feedback that I don't always get in the real world.  I also get a different community that stays together based on mutual interest rather than some of the associations that are used in the real world.  I think there is more choice out there.

That being said, I would seriously warn anyone who is beginning to blog about exposure.  The more you expose, the more you can gain from others feeding back, but you are also...exposed.  All of my personal attacks have come from anonymous readers who take advantage of their protected identity while becoming rather intrusive with me.  These are readers who can get as close as my posts will allow them. Along with being anonymous they have one other characteristic in common.  The attacks say more about them than they do about me.  I will give two examples:

"I feel sorry for your husband; you are a bitch and he will leave you."  I have taken the liberty to correct the grammar from the poster, who writes at a much lower grade level.  Poster is not feeling sorry for SB.  Poster is feeling sorry for herself/himself and she/he is probably single.  I imagine the poster is wondering why I get a mate and she/he is so much "nicer" but is alone.  Because you are probably not so nice, honey.  Read your message to me and think about it.  I would defend my bitchiness but I am too busy being loved up.

"Haha, you have a big nose.  How does he kiss you with such a shnoz?....you are not an interesting writer."  This was one of the posts that caused me to close my original blog.  I won't include the more personal attacks because they were much more personal...in fact, so personal that the anonymous poster outed herself as the woman who SB broke up with three years before I even met him, who was so disinterested in me that she ran a search of my name online and stalked my posts.  I would defend my nose but there are enough pictures of me for you to judge.  Yes, I broke it playing rugby but that would make it crooked, not big.

The internet, just like the real world, has bullies who hide in the back of the classroom and attack others in calculated and very personal attacks.  Unlike that bully in the classroom who you will eventually chase out of the room when you freaking snap, these internet fiends are able to stay hidden.  Of course I wonder how satisfying it is for them when they cannot measure a reaction.  When I shut down the first blog, my non-anonymous poster stepped up an anonymous e-mail campaign but after she got no response she eventually deflated and slithered away.  And I am still busy being loved up.